Enjoying a new lease of life

Wilton’s Music Hall is the perfect place to meet Marc Almond. Down a lane in London's east end, one would never guess that such a dramatic landmark exists so discreetly off the beaten track. As Almond steps into the high-ceilinged expanse of the UK's oldest working music hall, the same could Rosetta Stone Store be said about this most singular of torch balladeers. The former vocalist with 1980s electro-pop duo Soft Cell may be about to make his first foray into musical theatre in Ten Plagues at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, yet his shades, jeans and v-neck with the wings of a blue bird tattoo peeking over the top seek to repel rather than invite attention. Once inside the building, the shades are removed and, as Almond settles into a chair with a cup of herbal tea, what emerges is an erudite and open figure, who is as willing to talk about his troubled childhood and the 2004 motorbike accident that left him in a coma as he is about his creative back catalogue. It is Ten Plagues that is occupying his mind the most. I was daunted when I was first approached,he says. We did a workshop and there were two other singers, one of whom was a trained opera singer, while the other had appeared in west end musicals. I can't read music and don't know how to follow bars, and there was little undisciplined me trying to get to grips with this serious music when I'm more of a verse and chorus man. All I could bring to it is something of myself, which is storytelling. Storytelling has always been at the heart of Almond's work, from early cover versions of Lou Reed and Jacques Brel songs with Almond's post-Soft Cell troupe, Marc And The Mambas, right through to Ten Plagues and the recent Feasting With Panthers album of musical interpretations of homoerotic poems by Count Eric Stenboc alongside works by Genet, Cocteau, Verlaine and Rimbaud. With a libretto by Shopping and F****** author Mark Ravenhill set to a score by composer Conor Mitchell in a production by former Citizens Theatre director and designer Stewart Laing, Rosetta Stone Cheap Ten Plagues focuses on London's 17th-century epidemic. The show's origins date back to a visit Almond made to see Ravenhill's play, Mother Clapp's Molly House. This tale of gay life in 18th-century London appealed to Almond's sense of history, and it was suggested to Ravenhill that if he ever needed a singer he should get in touch. While such a proposal remained vague, Ravenhill called Almond's bluff, writing an entire song cycle with him in mind that formed the basis of Ten Plagues. Given his penchant for high drama, both in his well-documented personal life and in his professional one, why has it taken Almond until now to tackle a fully fledged piece of theatre? I've always been somebody desperate to stay in my comfort zone,he confesses. But whenever I put an album together I always imagine it like a musical show, with a big opening and a finale, and I always invent my own storyline, so I've always got some kind of narrative to work with. So that satisfied that side of me, but once I'd recovered from my accident, I felt it was time to get out of that comfort zone and challenge myself. I'd lost my voice, I'd lost my confidence, I'd lost my energy. My eardrum burst, my lung collapsed, all these things that are a singer's worst nightmare happened, and I had to take singing lessons to get it all back. Once I'd got this new lease of life, it sounds like a cliché, but I felt I had to make the most of it. Before his accident Almond was offered the part of Emcee in the west end production of Cabaret. I turned it down,he says. I was always making excuses to say no to things. Then when I was offered Ten Plagues, with this new lease of life, I jumped at it. I just thought I had to do it, and if I fail, then I fail, because as an artist you've got to be prepared for failure. You've got to be fearless, otherwise you're not an artist. If things had worked out differently, Almond might not have become an Rosetta Stone Chinese V3 artist at all. Born in Southport, he discovered singing at school near Leeds and as a teenager joined an amateur dramatics group. His ambition was to be a dancer but, dyslexic, with a stammer and bodily co-ordination so bad as to fall over my feet,he sang with a rock band doing covers of Free and, crucially, David Bowie. Despite having no qualifications, he applied for a place on Leeds Polytechnic's art course, and was allowed in at the behest of lecturer, poet, painter, performer and key figure in Britain's 1960s counter-culture, Jeff Nuttall. Jeff was an amazing inspiration,says Almond. He'd make fun of me, but without him I would never have got in.